Ewa Opałka
research indicating a direct impact of pornography on men’s behaviour while developing the report was opposed by scientists themselves7. At the same time her position is close to the concept of the film medium as essentially pornographic (based on pleasure derived from voyeurism and scopophilia), a concept originating in the psychoanalytic film theory, which in the 1970s returned in reflections of feminists studying films. In turn, in a chapter dedicated to the changes in pornography since the 1970s, the scholar focuses on how the women’s perspective transforms pornography at present. Trying to define what postpornography might be (a tall order, since pornography itself by its nature evades definitions), it is worthwhile to invoke a formula developed by Williams, who in turn refers to the notion of re-vision from Adrienne Rich’s text When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-vision. Re-vision is seen as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival”8. As Williams sums up the women’s perspective in the discourse on pornography: “the idea of re-vision is especially crucial in the context of this traditionally male genre: ‘survival’ means a transformation from a sexual object into a sexual subject of representation”9.
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